The above image was made with stable diffusion using the prompt 'glowing wires in a brain Be the Change You Want to See.'
I just sent out a new Substack newsletter. Titled 'Be the Change You Want to See,' the piece includes stuff from this blog along with original material. It gets into trauma, mental illness, and addiction, with a focus on how these things benefit the control regime. In short, unwell people are good consumers who pose no threat to the regime's power.
Although the news has been dominated by foreign wars lately, I did run across this article from the Economist that said a fourth of police departments are using drones while a tenth of departments are using facial recognition technology. And a Daily Mail article described the retail theft crisis contributing to the hollowing out of urban centers. From the article:
A CVS pharmacy in Washington DC has been forced to replace almost all its stock with photographs in an attempt to combat rampant shoplifting. ... Amid the shoplifting crisis, CVS has joined rival drugstore chains Rite Aid and Walgreens in closing over 1,500 stores combined in the coming months. ... As a result of the routine shoplifting occurring across the country, data from CapitalOne Research estimated stores had lost $86.6 billion to retail theft in 2022 and projected that by 2025, retail theft may cost stores over $115 billion. ... Analysts at UBS have also predicted that at least 50,000 shops will close in the US over the next five years due to the increase in theft coupled with moves to online shopping.
This crisis appears to involve three types of criminals. There are swarms of juvenile delinquents who coordinate their attacks with texts. There are individual opportunists who loot at every opportunity. And there are organized crime groups stealing for online resale markets.
Here in Minneapolis, this is a relatively new phenomenon. It began in 2020 and never went away. Notably, the total surveillance of everything has not stopped the large scale thefts. Criminals are aware that no one is out there solving crimes and trying to catch them. The police may have drones now, but they're not using them to chase shoplifters.
The disappearance of retail is combining with massive office space vacancies to destroy formerly vibrant neighborhoods. Instead of crowds of people working and shopping, there are crowds of people camping on the sidewalk, strung out on drugs and begging for money. While the endgame is unclear, this situation is clearly unsustainable.
Some areas will devolve into slums. Some areas will feature armed guards at every turn. If rent prices collapse, businesses may begin returning to the empty locations, producing a fresh round of gentrification. Unfortunately, once a place is lost, it's hard to bring it back.
Mass surveillance aided by facial recognition systems is very dystopian. So is combating shoplifting by replacing actual products with pictures of products on store shelves. Our immediate future looks like hollowed out urban centers overrun with petty criminals who are beyond caring about getting caught on camera. Even in a best case scenario, it'll take years to turn things around.
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